Demo Notes

[Manxome]

(For the record, I downloaded the demo from GOG, not sure if it's identical to the Steam version. Played on Windows 10.)


When soothing an aura, there was some inconsistency regarding timing. Selecting the pupil doing the action said it would take 4 turns, but selecting the aura being soothed said it would take 2 turns. The pupil actually spent 4 turns, with the aura claiming to be 1 turn away from done for 3 turns in a row. But I think the penalty from the aura might have disappeared after only 2 turns? Not 100% sure, wasn't paying close enough attention.

I got an exploration event that said something like "there's 200 resources on this space, they are whatever you want, use buildings to harvest them".
- There was no indication on the map that this space had resources, which was confusing. There was no way to see how many resources were left.
- When I had someone harvest pack animals from this space, the game said they were carrying 40 of them during the trip back to my caravan, but when they arrived I only received 1.
- While that pupil was gathering pack animals, I told another pupil to use a building that was nearby the wild spot to gather wool. Instead of selecting another nearby wool resource spot, it assigned the new pupil to the wild spot, interrupting the first pupil who was already in the process of gathering pack animals from it. The first pupil had to start over by going all the way back to my caravan to get the correct role and then coming all the way back to resume gathering. It was pretty frustrating, and not consistent with the way the UI normally works when gathering from regular spots.

The explorable event spots...ergh, already forgot the name...ruins? remnants?...they say in their description that you can use an Herbalist to discover what the event is without setting it off. But when looking at the skill tree, the ability to do this seems to be under the Druid, with the Herbalist getting a skill to investigate "sacred sites" (which I don't think I encountered). Didn't get my level high enough to test this out, though.

When a vagary started a forest fire, the buff icon appeared on the pupil who was standing in the forest instead of on the forest itself.

I got a termites vagary that damaged buildings adjacent to jungles on a map with no jungles.

If there are 2 different resources on a tile, then while one pupil is finished gathering resources and in the process of hauling them back, you can assign another pupil to start gathering the other resource (the game warns you the first pupil will be reassigned to another resource space or will stop working). But if a tile only contains 1 resource, it doesn't seem to be possible to assign a new pupil to start gathering until the old pupil has finished returning to the associated building, which seems weird and inconsistent.

When a pupil's movement route will take more than 1 turn to complete, there should be markers for where they're going to stop on each turn. (I realize this requires a bid of fudging if they're going into unexplored terrain, but it should at least work in other situations.) This includes when they have a gather/build/production task that will take more than 1 turn to reach.

I had one incident where a pupil's displayed route circled around a bog (move cost 2), through plains + hill (combined move cost 3) instead. No idea why. It maybe could have been related to the fact that it was raining?

It is often not clear which hex a pupil is standing in, because they tend to linger right next to the border.

Alerts about upcoming vagaries, low food, etc. are not noticeable enough. (A sound effect when they appear might be a good idea.)

Low food warning should occur at least 5 turns before you run out of food. (I don't think it was, but am not 100% sure, because, as noted above, it wasn't noticeable enough.) If you have to reassign a pupil to gather pemkins as an emergency measure, you will usually need at least 5 turns' warning.

It's kind of obnoxious that you can only see the movement cost of a hex if you have a unit selected. I realize that this is because the cost is sometimes different for different units, but you still might want to think about showing a "typical cost" when nothing is selected (maybe in another color?).

Buildings display a resource-multiplier value, but I couldn't figure out what this value is based on. Could use a tooltip.

It would be nice to have a way to "queue" instructions for a pupil. Two main use cases for this:
- when exploring, sometimes you want to force the pupil to take an inefficient route for purposes of getting vision of something along the way
- it would be convenient to be able to say "go do this new task once you're done with your current gathering trip", rather than needing to catch them on exactly the turn they finish a delivery to avoid wasting turns

The camera controls assigned to letter keys are really weird.
I was expecting: WASD pans the map (like the arrow keys), QE rotate, and zoom is, uh, anything else nearby (maybe ZC or RF). And probably +- should also zoom.
Instead, I think it was something like QD pans sideways, AE rotates, S zooms in, and W doesn't do anything obvious? I gave up trying to figure it out, but kept accidentally trying to use them throughout the game.

When choosing where to place a building, right-click should cancel.

There were at least a dozen times that the end-turn button didn't work the first time I clicked on it.

[Manxome]

It's possible to get two pupils with the same name. (This should be avoided, if only because it makes it hard to tell them apart.)

When leaving a halt, in the storage UI, the "camp" icon doesn't update its position properly when you research storage size upgrades, and it ends up on top of the storage cells, making one of the cells hard to click.

In the early tutorial, when it tells you to settle your caravan so that your pupils can start working, the name of the button the tutorial tells you to press doesn't match the actual name on the button.

You may want to consider adding an option to exile a specific pupil from your caravan (losing them as if they had died). If you don't want to add this, then you should consider either changing your generator algorithm so that a pupil can't start with 2 negative traits OR allowing the player to see the traits before they choose to take a new pupil from a friendly caravan. Some trait combinations are so awful that having the pupil is arguably worse than not, even outside crisis situations. (I got a pupil with +50% food consumption that requires 2 camp slots to work.)